Customers are like snowflakes

Customers are like snowflakes. Every one of them is different. They buy different products, produce different products / solutions, have different operational practices, different use cases and different duty cycles.

And most OEMs have thousands, if not tens of thousands of such snowflakes as their customers. Scattered across different industries, geographies and sizes.

To this situation, add one more level of complexity – the OEMs offering catalog. Most manufacturers have hundreds, if not thousands of different products, parts and services that are available for sale to these end customers operating in the OEM’s Installed Base

Given this, it is not difficult to understand why most manufacturers are reactive in their approach to Aftermarket Service. Waiting until the customer needs something and calls them is easier than understanding all of these snowflakes. Being proactive is extremely hard with this level of complexity across your customer base.

In fact, a survey conducted recently by Entytle indicated that almost 80% OEMs are reactive and less than 10% are proactive. With these practices, it is no surprise that most OEMs lose Aftermarket wallet share to competitors, third party providers and others in the ecosystem. Our analysis indicates that OEMs get less than 20-25% share of their customers Aftermarket spending.

So what’s an OEM to do? There are 3 immediate steps that we recommend:

Develop a single source of truth – a data repository – of all customer interactions